Tuesday, March 29, 2011

News has finally filtered out of Iran's secret execution of an Iranian-Jewish woman and her Armenian (Orthodox Christian) husband. According to the Christian news agency Mohaba, it is not known what they were charged with. Relatives asking for the bodies to be returned for burial were threatened with arrest (with thanks: Janet):

At dawn on Monday March 14, 2011 a Jewish-Armenian couple along with one women and two other men were secretly executed.

According to the Iranian Christian News Agency "Mohabat News" and based on reports from the human rights activists in Iran, the 28th divisional court of the Revolutionary Court, located inside the Evin prison, in confirming this execution refused to provide any further details about the release of the bodies of the executed prisoners.

Mrs. Adiva Mirza Soleiman Kalimi, a Jewish Iranian, and her husband, Varoujan Petrosian, an Armenian Iranian, along with one other woman and two men, whose identities remain unknown, were secretly executed in Evin Prison.

It is still not known what those prisoners were charged with.

It is noteworthy that the families of the victims, who had asked the authorities to return the bodies of their loved ones in order to be buried according to their cultural and religious customs ,have received threats of arrest from the agents of the Ministry of Intelligence.

Has somebody gotten in touch with Roger Cohen? He has assured us that things like this could not possibly take place in modern, progressive Iran under that nice Mr Ahmadinejad. It's probably just a misunderstanding. Maybe Roger can use his good offices with Mr A-jad to inform us that there really were no such executions. Roger knows that things like this simply cannot happen in Iran. Roger can probably locate these folks still alive somewhere backstage at the Teheran opera.

And if Roger can't help, maybe wise Mr Obama knows better than we do that all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)